Have your say & ask the experts

Hi I am thinking about getting a music server to play music stored on my pc thru my Hi Fi setup and have internet radio capabilties. The Pc is in another part of the house so I couldn't connect the pc direct to the amp via a top dollar audio card unless i run a very long cable from pc to amp through 2 walls, and across the hall. Missus would have a fit. Hence the music server. My Hi Fi consists of: Cambridge Audio 540R V3 (primarily a HC AV amp but excellent with music - may still get 540A v2 though), Cambridge Audio 540c, Cambridge Audio 640P, Pink Triangle Turntable, Acoustic Energy Neo 3's. As you can tell i went for the Cambridge Audio setup, not purposly mind you. I knew that musically, they were very good back in the day and still has a very good name so i to listen to them and ended up buying. There were others i compared them to but CA fitted the ears, eyes and pocket perfectly. Anyhoo, Obviously i had check out the CA 640h but £600 is very steep and i was unable demo it. Reviews for it wasn't that favorable either, problems with ripped cd names, noisey fan and possible reliability issues but all agreed that the sound was of CA Standards and build Quality. It can also connect wirelessly to a network and has internet radio, But there was little, if any others cheaper that i could find. What others can be recommended for around £300-400? Whats more, what are your views on music servers? are they worth it?

yes, they're the way forward. There's a hole in the market between 200 and 600 quid, but the Squeezebox and Roku Soundbridge, together with Apple TV (just ignore the TV bit) are the ones to look at.

Edit - I'd stay away from those which have internal hard disks, since you;re paying for somethign you have already, and/or limit yourself to the sapce available on it -better to use the infinitely-expandable storage on your home netwrk, either wired or wirelessly.

There is also the Sonneteer Bard system which is very cool and easy to use, it can send music stored on your PC wirelessly to your hifi. They also have the Morpheos soon which looks really cool which may suit your needs as well, I don't know the price of it though.

Thank the lord for these forums. Could of ended up buying something completely unnecessary. So thank you both. The only difference i could tell between the types of music servers is the hard drive which (to me) does not warrant an extra £430 + . Also my music is already stored on an external 500gb hard drive. I checked out all 3 and I'm drawn to the Squeeze Box 3. All the reviews that I've read on it are very favorable. My concerns was sound quality and dropouts over a wireless connection but these seems to have been resolved by what they have said and results of tests done. A good wireless connection is determined by how far the wireless router is and/or strength of the frequency range so hopefully I'll be ok if bought. It would of been interesting to see what is the lowest % of frequency strength they will work at. If i have a gripe it is that i'll have to have the pc on when i want to play digital music. I don't like the idea of uploading and using an online music storage but at £170, it does seem like a no brainer. . Would you know where i can i get a demo? I live in South London. Also, the Squeeze Box 3 and Logitech's Squeeze Box Classic - the same product aren't they? They look exactly the same to me.

Hi again. After much deliberation i've decided on a SB3 over the Roku. Main reasons are The SB3 wireless connection is better than the Roku and also they stopped making the M1000 and is very hard to come by. There is another version by Pinnacle but it is inferior compared to the M1000 hence the cheaper price. I'm also may change my ext drive to a NAS which would allow me to play my music and will allow the other pc/laptop to store/access files without a live pc.. I've narrowed it down to 2: QNAP TS-101 500gb with pre-installed Slimserver software £400 or the Maxtor Shared Storage II 1TB £170. Obviously i'm leaning towards to Maxtor but Slimserver is not pre-installed. Can it be installed onto it and is the Maxtor compatible with the SB3? Your thoughts would be welcomed.

Will investigate - some are simply not compatible with Slimserver.

If I forget tomorrow, bump the thread.

[quote user="Hendy00"]Hi again. After much deliberation i've decided on a SB3 over the Roku. Main reasons are The SB3 wireless connection is better than the Roku and also they stopped making the M1000 and is very hard to come by. There is another version by Pinnacle but it is inferior compared to the M1000 hence the cheaper price. I'm also may change my ext drive to a NAS which would allow me to play my music and will allow the other pc/laptop to store/access files without a live pc.. I've narrowed it down to 2: QNAP TS-101 500gb with pre-installed Slimserver software £400 or the Maxtor Shared Storage II 1TB £170. Obviously i'm leaning towards to Maxtor but Slimserver is not pre-installed. Can it be installed onto it and is the Maxtor compatible with the SB3? Your thoughts would be welcomed.[/quote]

You are right about the Roku. I got my M1000 &M2000 through ebay. It is amazing that for the sake of a few dollers, the designers went for a chip set that needed non integer upsampling. As predicted by a few users,this caused a level of constant noise in the background. This "development" is a shame as the Roku concept is a good one.In some ways the Roku is superior to the SB in that it can use a general pnp music server. From what I understand about the SB is that a lot of functionality is the responsibility of the slimserver software rather then the SB itself which makes the unit very dependent on this software.

I use Maxtor MSS+ NAS drives with the Firefly media server installed on them. The NAS drives had to be hacked to open them up to telnet (I don't think this hack is available for the MSS II that you are looking at).Then I downloaded some linux macros that did the rest (my linux is VERY poor). The SB DAC is much better then the Roku as is the audio outputs. I use an external DAC (Cyrus DAC-X) to get around this. And as I use FLAC compression, I am finding the results identical to my Sony SCD777 es playing through the same DAC (its multiple inputs being very useful for AB switching comparisons).

I use a wired Ethernet network as I have found wifi couldn't cope with .wav size files (The Firefly transcodes the FLAC to .wav on the fly) without causing the Roku to keep rebuffering every 20 seconds (You cant listen to music under those conditions !)

I also listen to internet radio which is easy to do through the Roku - mostly the prog stations-music is good but quality is a bit iffy (MP3 ok for my archos but badly exposed through the hifi- but thats another story).

[quote user="Anton90125"]I use a wired Ethernet network as I have found wifi couldn't cope with .wav size files (The Firefly transcodes the FLAC to .wav on the fly)[/quote]

Interesting point I hadn't considered actually - I mean the NAS with Slimserver or whatever is def the way to go, but I don't know whether my 11g network would cope with pcm - wired probably the way to go if you can manage it (or upgrade to 11n)

I have all of my lossless music and video on a computer that I stream to a Squeezebox and PS3, respectively.

I find that it works over WiFi but because it is all physically quite close, I wire into the Router. This method is more rebust, but you should be fine streaming lossless music over WiFi. I did with an Apple Airport Express with no drop outs at all.

A NAS is essentially a low-powered computer, so I feel I am better off with an old computer as a server, as it has some power to transcode and run a few bits of server software. I can also use it for ripping, batch encoding, and downloading. My "server" is simply an old laptop with a broken screen - I just log into it remotely with XP Pro Remote Desktop. Simple.

I use the Roku Soundbridge M1000 wirelessly with no dropouts of rebuffering and I've been more than impressed with quality but then I'm no audiophile. It's a shame that Roku don't produce them anymore because, from what I've heard, the Pinnacle version is nowhere near as good. The support guys on the forums are very helpful as is the user community on there. My only gripe is that it won't play DRM protected tracks but I guess there's a proliferation of web sites selling DRM free music these days. I store my music in Apple Lossless format on a Thecus N2100 NAS box carrying two Seagate 400Gb hard drives that are configured as RAID1 from what I gather means that one disk mirrors the other. The reason I went for a NAS and this one in particular is so that I can have a small (quietish) box running in the living room as apposed to a large noisy PC or have to trot upstairs to turn on the PC every time I want to listen to music. The Thecus NAS has Firefly pre-installed and has a very simple to use web interface. It was a bit pricey but I've been more than pleased with performance combined with the Roku.

Just to update you guys, I bought a squeezebox 3(classic)and must say, Outstanding bit of kit. Extremely pleased i am. It is networked via a cable at the mo but also tried wireless for a few days - which does require a bit of savvy of your router - Still Happy. Even more happy that i save £50 from of all places - pcworl

I played mainly mp3 but will get round to flac's soon enough. Wav files are no problem since it is cable networked but I'm planning on getting another which will be wireless.

If anybody is interested the QNAP ts-10x nas drives now comes with SqueezeCenter(Slimserver) support which you download and installed via instructions on their website. So it shouldn't be such a pain in the a$$$ to install anymore. I've ordered the TS-109II so i find out soon enough if that true or not.

Once again Thanks all for your help, you saved me not only half the price of my original suggestion but i also have more versatility with this setup. Cheers

Hi

Very interested in doing the same as you and would like to hear how you get on with the NAS drive as i don't really want to run up stairs every time i want to play some music.Also if you don't mind could you tell me how much you payed for the squeezebox and the NAS drive.

Thanks

Mike 

Just a quick note i notice they have reduced the price of the Cambrigde 640 to £299.00 but there seems to be a few issues with these plus you can't use Flac on them.

Squeeze Box Classic =£130 web offer only from pcworld. In Shop price=£175
Qnap TS 109 NAS drive = £178 from SCAN but this was just for the enclosure - no hard drive.

I bought and installed a 500gb HDD (2 minutes job) separately from a computer fair for £40 so total price = £218 for complete NAS. There are sites selling the NAS with different hdd sizes included, but they were more expensive even for the smaller hdd unit.

Grand total =£348

I work in IT so setup was fairly easy but took a fair while to complete to my satisfaction and most of that was down to me playing with all the options. They do supply a quick setup guide. Squeezecenter 7 was easy to download and install via Qnap's QPKG service and once running on the NAS, was able to point the SB to the nas without much hassle. Be warned that on arrival, my TS 109 firmware was 1.1.3 and needed to be upgraded to the latest release (2.1.0) to get the QPKG option which the User Manual(PDF file) failed to mention.
The SB requires the IP address of the NAS so it would be wise to give the NAS a 'Static' IP address if using a router with DHCP. The NAS will not be found once its IP address is renewed by the DHCP service and there will be no music as the SB will still be looking for the old IP address. (if this is all gibberish and you req help doing this, hola back)

Important point: You will have to give Full Access Rights to the administrator group on Qnap's Qmultimedia share folder to copy music to it. Otherwise you get the annoying message of 'Network Access Denied'. Again the user manual failed to mention that. Took even more time to work out where to do this. The Public folder has it as standard.

Wireless: Sounds just as good and no drop outs or re-buffering -but since they are in the same room i wouldn't expect any. i will be getting 1 more SB for another room. Deciding on which room.
So all in all -Extremely happy man indeed

You are right about the 640H for £299, but I still wouldn't change my setup.
I can always change the hdd if fails or upgrade to a bigger at anytime with no hassle.
It is also used as to backup my pc and share my stored my music/photos/data to with other pc's.
Can add more SB's and point them to the same NAS. Just need decent active computer speakers

Can't do any of that with the 604H. To have more than 1 will require downloading entire music collection to each unit and a hifi setup of sorts

This does begs the question though. why drop half price in so short time? Reliability issues me thinks.

hope this helps

Hi

Thanks for the reply sound just what i want , just a couple more questions are you using Flac files for your music and secondly whats the sound quality like.

 

Thanks

Mike

Sound Quality is superb. The SB has a Burr Brown 24 Bit DAC so no need to buy a external DAC like other media streamers. I was well surprise by how good it was. But that depends on the quality of the music files played. Not all my downloaded mp3's are of decent quality which really shows up. Any i have copied from a CD are crisp and clear, but even some cd's can be dodgy sometimes.

I don't have any flac files to test with as yet but i shall rip a few to Flac and have a play once i downloaded the software (so those dodgy cd's should sound better than mp3).
Before i bought an SB, i checked out some forums and reviews and flac files are top of the list when it came to quality. From what i can gather, don't bother with converting mp3 to flac as this will not improve sound quality but make the files bigger, but use flac when ripping from cd. This makes sense because you cannot improve something that is not there. So if flac is what you already have, you are on to a winner already.

One other thing, the remote control is not the most aesthetically pleasing but it's not pig ugly. It is easy to operate and does what it suppose to do.